


acquaint ourselves with vice

by chaparral_crown



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Different First Meeting, Alternate Universe - His Dark Materials Fusion, Comfort Zones Are For Other People, Daemon Intimacy in Reverse, Dark Will Graham, Hannibal Lecter Loves Will Graham, M/M, Season/Series 01, Self-Acceptance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-25
Updated: 2021-02-25
Packaged: 2021-03-15 15:42:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 16,516
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29686215
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chaparral_crown/pseuds/chaparral_crown
Summary: Garret Jacob Hobbs dies in an ignominious pool of his wife's and daughter’s blood -  it takes ten gunshots to do it. Will jokes privately to himself, which is to say he jokes to Evangeline at his side who he knows will understand because she is him, panting around her red mouth, that while he previously did not think he needed glasses, maybe he does now.---Will Graham's hiding in a polite shell. His daemon is not. After the death of the Minnesota Shrike, it is advised that he seek professional help in resolving that.
Relationships: Will Graham/Hannibal Lecter
Comments: 69
Kudos: 335





	acquaint ourselves with vice

“Is she yours?” asks the HR representative. 

Her name is Susan - she’s nice, or she’s been nice over the phone. All the new agent applications are handled as gracefully as can be when someone intends to cross-reference if you ever lied about underage drinking, or what was in your suitcase on a trip to Nogales, or if your daemon is the type to hiss or bark. She’s less so when Will takes a seat in the ugly waffle-weave brown chair across from her desk. 

Evangeline, ears pricking upwards at thigh level, bows her body low, nervous, like she can hide beneath the seat, take her speckled coat and disappear. 

“Yes,” says Will. He already knows where this is going. It’s where it usually goes. “She’s mine.”

The evaluation interview for the agent position doesn’t go well from then on. It would have been kind of them to do this before he sunk all the time into it. It’s not as if she was a state secret, and that she hasn’t been this way for almost thirty years. It’s not as if she was anything but what she is. 

( _ Throat tight, halfway dedicated to the yammering howl of empty spaces, which no one likes to be reminded of. _ )

( _ Except you. _ ) 

\---

Will’s daemon settles early, following a year where he and his father move no less than three times. Her bones twist long and lanky, her eyes go wild, and she stays to the edges of a room, the same way Will does amongst strangers, and as he grows older, among adults. 

It’s a good form, even if no one other than his daddy agrees.

“Clever, wily,” says Beau, hands in his pockets. “Been watchin’ too many cartoons, boy, but then again I reckon maybe it’s that you’s been outside too much.” 

By standard developmental expectations, Will’s daemon should by all rights be confused and unwilling to choose a form to settle in. After all, the shape of their home changes with each season - from apartment, to migrant worker housing, to a brief stint on a house boat, to staying with friends with a good heater and some extra space. They visit Louisville, Memphis, and Baton Rouge, coming down from a hard winter on the shores of Lake Erie and the long Ohio River, coming to rest in the Mississippi. It’s suggested that it’s traumatic to move a child that often, and for such brief periods of time. 

“Perhaps a bit much for a seven year old,” says Will’s second grade teacher, and Beau blows her off because Beau blows off anyone that tries to tell him how to raise and provide for his child. 

“You don’ listen t’ her,” says Beau, snapping, defensive. Will’s always thought a little bit of Evangeline is made by his daddy, or what Will perceived of him. “We make do ‘cause that’s what needs doin’ t’ make ends meet.” 

There’s very little in common between the corn fields of Ohio down to the bayous of Louisiana. But where the landscape changes, and the foods are different, and all the accents are warped by the gravity of the southern pull of the waterways, there certainly are the same coyotes singing in the desert, and the grasslands, and the river banks, and the ones that aren’t look lonely, unable to find their choir. Will listens to them at night, clutching Evangeline close between highways and school registrations, and when she goes from hesitant sandpiper tucked next to his head with her soft sounds to wolfish yips and the lean spread of not-quite-a-dog’s body, he has the comfort of that consistency forever. 

She scares parents, and the teachers, and occasionally people on the street, like she should be a real one, not a coyote shaped man-woman-animal-whatever the bond is designed to be. It upsets Will, who never can fully explain away why she is what she is. 

“Evangeline’s got a right t’be whatever she see fit,” his father tells Will, and crosses his arms, eying the curled up fur, the bushy tail, the shy golden eyes that avoid being seen too long. “Versatile, that’s what she is. Your roamin’ lady from tip t’ tail of America.”

His daddy loves him, and his daddy loves Evangeline as an extension of Will, so he doesn’t say anything Will doesn't learn to expect already, even if Beau does keep his hands far from her long teeth.

( _ You’ve heard all the insults from other people since she settles into this shape: dirty, pest, ignoble. Nobody likes a coyote, not the way they like wolves. Their sins are small, and run against the arbitrary and shifting property lines of suburbia, as though the sins of small lives are not valuable, and their unwanted adaptable success is a crime instead of evolution. In your experience, small lives are the ones that endure, and you take the knowledge of that as a sign that you will too. _ ) __

Like Will, Evangeline laughs at the wrong things, and unlike Will, she doesn’t edit that she delights in it, although she doesn’t sing the way she’d like to. Already too strange for polite company without  _ that _ , but a proud enough creature to yammer and yip between the two of them. They both know better than to howl, even if it’s somewhere down the back of his throat, a small boy’s happiness at the singing in the dark, and his spirit growing to a shape well-suited to the hot breath and hungry chorus of unseen night creatures.

\---

“Are you ashamed of me?” asks Evangeline, when the rejection letter comes. 

“No,” says Will, because he isn’t, even if sometimes he is. 

When the teaching position request comes instead, “a concession to your excellence in profiling”, Will whispers into her angular ears that she is better than him, because he is ashamed of himself.

\---

When he’s older still, and settled into their routine between Quantico and home, he provides Evangeline a disguise - dog after dog in a packed circle on the floors of their home, so that she doesn’t need to be alone at night.

( _ She also stands out less in a crowd, the same way you do - head down, comments kept to yourself until you think you might burst if you don’t say them. _ ) 

Animals know daemons from their numbers, as they know people, and they circle her, friendly, separate, always other. Visitors sometimes can’t tell the difference as she weaves between furred bodies, sliding away from their eyes, but the pack does every time. Some of the dogs are kinder and look to her the same way they look to Will, as though she can provide instruction or treats. Some ignore her even though they love and anticipate Will. Anomalies disrupt the social order of all pack animals. 

“The needs are different,” she snorts, and turns to pace the edges of the property. She stays quiet even in the rural wooded edges of Wolf Trap, voice trapped between them. “To not disturb the neighbors,” they agree, and grit their teeth through the days of work, and the days between those as well. 

There is no time that they can be heard, and not have someone misunderstand it. Perhaps because they do not speak up, Jack Crawford thinks they’re safe for the public, even if the public has already rejected them over and over again. 

\---

Garret Jacob Hobbs dies in an ignominious pool of his wife's and daughter’s blood - it takes ten gunshots to do it. Will jokes privately to himself, which is to say he jokes to Evangeline at his side who he knows will understand because she  _ is _ him, panting around her red mouth, that while he previously did not think he needed glasses, maybe he does now. 

“It’s better when it’s not just for show anyway,” he says, wiping the blood from the lenses in measured, round strokes, focusing on that one small thing. “It makes sure you squint at the right times.” 

“Keeps people from asking why you had to fire that many rounds too, I guess,” says Evangeline, long snout and tail pointed to the ground, but snickering as only she can. “Look on the bright side,” she adds, lifting her head to nose his fingers, still tacky with blood, “bad aim’s better than no aim.” 

Jack Crawford doesn’t find this funny - it’s the first time he’s properly understood why Will and Evangeline are faculty, not agents, and he doesn’t like what that looks like in the eye of an outsider’s perception. Nor does his forensic team, or the local police that come to secure the scene, or Alana Bloom fluttering at the edges of it. Nobody but Evangeline, and her frenzied grin. But predictably, with her slavering mouth at the edges of the crime scene, hair raised at the spine, and the shameful hunger that she often shows and Will has grown capable of hiding on himself, the fact that Evangeline finds it funny is enough to merit concern. 

“We’d like for you to get an evaluation,” says Jack when they return home, and it becomes too difficult to pretend that they think Will’s fine, even if he’s done exactly what he was asked to do. 

“A mental one,” Will supplies, stroking the daemon’s ears beneath the desk, pressed against her long skull and ashamed once more, distressed by his guilt. She’s quiet now, nocturnal, hiding from the sun and the scrutiny of Crawford under the guest’s side of the desk the way she wanted to at their very first evaluation. He has half a mind to crawl down there with her, and fortify the space against people - give them something to actually worry about when the two of them declare it to be a sovereign state, and only grossly incorrect senses of humor are welcome. 

Maybe they’re onto something and Will’s not really a fully formed adult after all - stunted somewhere between the changing confluences of the Mississippi River, where ironically Evangeline stops changing.

( _ For such a fluid person, you’ve always found that to be something to depend on - the way your mind fills things is fluid, but your body and your daemon remain the same. An illusion of constancy. _ ) 

“Just for peace of mind,” says Alana. “Standard procedure for agents after a casualty in the field. I have a great referral for you, someone that said he’d be happy to make the time for you. Really great with abnormal daemons. I considered recommending him before you were brought into the Shrike case, but…”

“Things escalated too fast,” Will supplies, hands still rubbing circles at Evangeline’s ears like he can clear splatter from them as easily as non-prescription glasses. “I get it.” 

“Just to get you back into the field, Will,” Jack says, clapping him on the shoulder from across the expanse of the desk. “You’re an asset to the team.”

“Just the kind that makes people check where I’m at in the room,” Will mutters. “Send me the information. I’ll set something up. For peace of mind,” he snorts. 

They both stare at the ground, and take names, and numbers, and timelines because that’s something they’ve grown accustomed to since the day they truly knew each other to be the shape they needed to be. 

( _ You are the same as her, but your mouth stays dry because you keep your mouth closed, and your hair lies flat because you’ve let it grow longer and you’re sweating from stress and it won’t rise against the weight of your own bodies of water, and that vacuous hunger is for a time sated in the emptying of a full ammunition magazine while your daemon must watch and vicariously take that deep rooted satisfaction for her own. There is no getting back in the field for her. The whole world is a fence. _ ) 

\---

“I could feel the woods when I looked at him,” says Evangeline.

( _ “See?” says Hobbs, and no, and yes, you do and you don’t. _ ) 

“You’ve never known the woods outside the creek,” says Will, shutting off the light. They lay in silence for a time, listening to the house settle, and the snuffling sound of seven dogs sleeping in round beds like stones in a garden. 

She sleeps as far as her tether will allow that night. 

\---

It takes him a week to do it, dodging calls from Jack, filling out paperwork and exam grades and lectures that are adjacent to psychotherapy but never actually press it into his heart that he is regrettably being asked to see a psychotherapist himself. There is no therapy relative to daemons that isn’t - people who say that there is are liars. Will’s seen a few before he learned to avoid them.

Will hesitates to tell actual colleagues that, of course, even if Evangeline can’t keep the sly downward arch of her neck from saying it anyways.

“My mentor,” Alana says in the faculty lounge, with a bright smile that matches the brightness of Hazel’s eyes, her kindly-looking black bear daemon who shares a lustrous coat of coal-dark hair that compliments Alana’s own curling locks. Will has often wondered if Hazel will be as soft and manicured as the woman appears to be, if that similarity carries through Dust the way that genetics do, and Hazel is a son or a brother of her spirit and the gloss of their hair will tie them together stronger than their tether. 

( _ You don’t ask. You certainly don’t try to touch either. Evangeline snaps the tiny incisors of her death’s head grin into the fabric of your sleeve the first time you think it - jealous, unwelcome. Your male outward interest in the woman doesn’t match what your roaming outward form wants, and you take that to mean something even if you crave the normalcy of Alana. _ )

Nobody asks if Hazel is predacious the way that it’s assumed Evangeline is - Hazel looks like he enjoys a berry patch, maybe some fish, raiding a campground for marshmallows were it not for him being a daemon and not thinking about such things, or so the science insists. He’s attentive to company. He’s welcome in the doorways of classes, greeted at the entry like a passing Disney character. He would likely maul someone that threatened either of them, but nobody likes transposing that idea of Hazel and Alana. Hazel and Alana don’t get referrals to specialists with uncommon daemons. 

“He’s really great,” she continues. “I’ve thought for a while that the two of you would get along, though his daemon can be a bit standoffish with people at first. Welcoming smile, sensitive heart, I’ve always assumed.”

Read as: _ I’ve wanted to refer you to a mental health professional for literal years. So happy to have an excuse now. _ Will skips the character text - he’s not looking to make friends. He glances down and Evangeline looks up, and they mutually sigh. 

“Aren’t daemons a truer reflection of mankind than the face that they wear?” asks Will, sipping at lounge coffee in the foam cups that have flowers on them, and that he will sooner be caught dead than carrying into a lecture. 

( _ “Isn’t that why we’re being forced to account for ourselves?” Evangeline whispers between them, unheard, more felt in the atlas of the top of the spine than in your ears. _ )

“Hannibal’s one of the most patient and obliging people I know,” she says with a shrug. “Can’t fault a person for having unexplored depths.” 

Will very nearly drops his coffee and finger guns his way out of the room, proclaiming “that’s rich, pull the other one”, but that would just reinforce his need for professional services, so instead he delivers a winning, wincing smile. He’s not good at social, and so Will doesn’t get the benefit of unexplored depths. That’s ok. It’s not the first time he’s heard it, and he suspects it won’t be the last. 

Evangeline covers his bases and gives her yipping laugh from the hallway, pulling away from him to the point where the tug between them is painful, but she can smile her self-indulgent smirk without further comment or observance. 

Alana hears Evangeline anyway, and gives a tight smile of her own, without teeth. “It’ll be good to have someone to talk to,” she says in her sympathetic way, and Will contemplates just pretending to throw up and blame it on high blood sugar from candy-coated bullshit. That too isn’t the best reaction to multiple people feeling he needs to go to a therapist and work through the fact that he and his inappropriate responses aren’t a symptom of being in a bad place mentally as much as they are a symptom of inside jokes of two flea-ridden coyotes tied at the soul, and only one of them cursed to look like it on the outside. 

( _ No one to sing with but each other, and you’re not much inclined to with your daemon these days, like someone will jump out and say “see?” the way Garret Jacob Hobbs does. Nowhere is safe to sing. _ )

Doctor Hannibal Lecter, MD, Psychiatry, doesn’t keep an assistant. He keeps an answering machine which he can return calls with, and on occasion will answer himself if the whimsy of connecting with an unknown number suits his fancy for the day, or so he explains at a much later date. A person accustomed to the pagers of the emergency room, and not much patience for the practicalities of new patient setup and an order of separation between him and his clientele. 

He leaves a message for the good doctor that night, and is politely emailed the next day in the early hours with a first-time patient screening form that he can fill out at his leisure. Many apologies extended for missing his call - Doctor Lecter found himself quite tied up with trussing a pig for an oven roast and wasn’t able to handle the phone until it was much later than is polite to return the call. Alana has already spoken to him about Will - he’s happy to meet at Will’s convenience. 

All for the best, thinks Will. One less conversation than he wanted to have to deal with is an instant win for him. Everything silently arranged and scheduled in the void of the internet so he can largely forget this is happening. 

The form is like other forms. Most things are standard. Some things are offensive.

**_Do you have allergies? Y/N._ ** Yes, to having smoke blown up his ass, but he’s been advised from cradle to college to special agent badge to maybe not say that out loud, so  **_No_ ** . 

**_Have you ever felt suicidal before, or been hospitalized for a sucide attempt? Y/N._** How’s that for an escalation? What person hasn’t woken up unhappy and thought “yes, I think I’ve done what I can here. Scrap the project - start over, or don’t start anything at all. You’ll find me here contemplating mortality until you don’t.” It feels too revealing to say it out loud though. It’s not medical information. It’s not related to daemons, or the fact that Will’s grasp on social etiquette is trending decidedly morbid these days and his daemon shows it like snow on a peak. So **_No_** in writing, **_Yes_** in thought. Why even ask, when the answer feels so obvious?

There are other questions of course - not that he’ll ever know his honest paternal or maternal medical history, because Beau is as closed mouthed as a clam out of water, and his mother may as well be the Blue Fairy from Pinocchio for all that he knows of her. He hasn’t pursued medication. He won’t entertain in-patient observation. He’s never been damaged enough to damage his Tether. He has no partners, legal or otherwise, and Evangeline’s fur remains pristinely ragged, undisturbed by outside forces - only their own. 

One detail does catch Will’s attention: 

**_Are you a bird enthusiast? Y/N._ **

It stumps him. 

He reads it twice to make sure he hasn’t just misread it, but no, it persists, like a marketing questionnaire trying to unsubtly tap into the avian photography demographic. Does Will like birds, or would he say that he is a fan of them, as one chooses baseball teams, or betting pools for office romance weddings and divorces ( _ of which you are a master of winning - the world is rife with obvious people with obvious daemons _ ). After reading past it for a few lines, there’s no additional details pertaining to it further down in the form either. 

When Will whispers “for God’s sake” in his best impression of his daddy, and Evangeline does little from her corner of the room other than a twitch of the ears to acknowledge it. Two of the dogs huff at her in turn, and draw close to feel her warmth, the curious kind like sunlight rather than the heat of muscle and fur. 

Will idly taps at the tabletop, chin in hand. 

These are the sorts of things that make Will hate psychiatrists beyond the usual aversion to having his soft undersides poked, as if his childhood trauma and struggles with human interaction are an exotic bug that should be documented for science. What kind of question is that even supposed to be? What does this Doctor Lecter think he’s going to infer from Will’s interest or apathy in birds? Is this some profiling bullshit picked up at a therapy conference? Do therapists  _ have _ conferences with profiling bullshit?

( _ Yes, you think. If the FBI does, then every other profession on earth is likely subject to bureaucratic motivational speeches and grant-sponsored interaction techniques that actively ignore people that like you exist. _ ) 

Will sighs, and considers. 

**_No_ ** , he answers, with no more experience with birds than any other creature that isn’t a dog, insects, or fish. He knows  _ of  _ gulls, he knows  _ of  _ sandpipers and cranes, and the other feathered things that live in marshes and are capable of angling alongside him in the shallows of a bayou or a creek because once upon a time his soul wanted to be that shape. They are no different to him than other people on a busy street to him these days, no more remarkable save for unlike people, Will doesn’t actively avoid looking at them, and soaking up their basic animal needs. They don’t project the way that people do, and he doesn’t soak them up as cloth soaks up fluid. 

So insofar as that, he’s not a bird enthusiast, but he is bird neutral, which by Will’s consideration, is practically a commendation of note.

**_No_ ** , persists the answer, and the mystery of the question. 

\---

The mystery, it turns out, presses as close and hot as molten lead in the most literal and not at all metaphorical sense that it can after an affectation of distance. The mystery’s thoughts are brushing at his ears. They’re holding him just next to a fountain of consciousness he’s not  _ quite _ close enough to understand yet. 

Doctor Lecter appears to be intrigued at this turn of events, as someone as stone faced and elegant as he can project, which is to say fixated to the scene unfolding, taking in the image like it’s as standard as his forms. 

“Isn’t he embarrassed?” asks Evangeline, where only the two of them can hear, panting into the khaki of his pants. 

Will just desperately keeps his hands away from the source of that murmuring noise. He thinks about murder, and vivisection, and how internal struggle manifests in external violence, and that despite that he never thinks to lay hands on another’s daemon, even if it is in his space. 

“No, I don’t think he is,” replies Will without words, each talon a nail, each nail sealing a coffin.

\---

The appointment doesn’t start off in this sort of chaos, though Will struggles to understand how it could have taken such a drastic turn. 

The lobby of Doctor Lecter’s office has the taste and appearance of a liminal dream, rather similar to the waiting room of a courthouse, or an airport terminal in that he feels the next space he crosses into will be somewhere much farther than merely past the door frame, like it’s possible to materialize in a gallery, or a ship’s cabin. He and Evangeline stare into  _ The Raft of the Medusa _ hung on the wall, man crawling over man, nothing to show for it but waves, and wonder what Doctor Lecter aims for as confession in the halls of his practice. 

“Do you suppose the intent is to unmoor people just in time for a storm?” asks Evangeline, quiet, meant to pass from her wide mouth to Will’s ears, but so so loud in the mute grey-green of the room, the same color of lichen growing on the north side of a tree. 

( _ “It wants to smell the same,” Evangeline whispers in your heart when she sees it, and you picture pressing your palm against it until it will hurt, and she her face to it until it pulls the ever-present smile-sneer out with it, black lips drawn out and dark. _ )

“Rather to put them in an attitude of seeking help.” 

Will turns at the sound of this, and Evangeline draws her ears close to her, eyes wide, always watching but not always the right thing. 

The office door is open to the waiting room - from it’s entry, a tall man with a face akin to a massif, angular and features worn away into something timeless, and like a massif, Will can tell nothing of the emotions written on it. He speaks pleasantly low, but his suit is loud, a matrix of dark grey and red and the finest lines of white. Will blinks when he sees it. No daemon though, so a man comfortable with his Tether pulled to violin string tightness, unlike Will is with his. 

“You must be Will,” says the man who must be Doctor Lecter. “Doctor Bloom said the two of you had sharp eyes, if cynical ones. We shall have to hope for better results than Gericault’s doomed frigate on the African coast.”

“As I understand it, the cuisine was the point of contention,” Will replies and walks to follow him through the door. 

Will can’t see it, but he feels the amusement pour off the man - secretive, like the doctor was glad to have turned away to gesture to the open office. He feels it through Evangeline, who is constantly looking for the butt of a joke, or the foot that dares not but someday might kick. She always knows first who maligns them. This is fair - she is often the first maligned. 

“As I understand it, it was the survival rate after 13 days of no rescue under a failing monarchy rather than cannibalism, but every news story needs a little gossip to find a strong headwind, wouldn’t you agree?” says Doctor Lecter. 

“It's certainly all they’ve wanted to talk about with regards to Hobbs,” says Will. “Eight girls, no - nine with Abigail Hobbs dead, and they want to know how they were prepared.” 

“Everyone’s a critic,” Evangeline says to the back of Will’s knee, loping behind him and opposite to their host, and this too makes the doctor smile widely but close-lipped. 

It’s a grand office, something with actual  _ levels _ , and rolling staircases, and a collection of scholarly, non-fiction, and fictional literature that comes in tidy categories, everything of value held overhead and unseen between the spectacle of animal horns, spears, ukiyo-e and medical diagrams. The magpie’s nest of a wealthy man, inclined to wealthy and educated tastes. 

The parts of Will raised between gas stations and bag lunches want to tell him his daddy named his daemon for the poem of the same title, like that should impress him. They’re here to discuss his daemon after all. He’s always had a hatchet to bury against aesthetes and their decorated laurels, things he’s had to fight uphill for with his humble animal of a daemon as his heels. Literature is for everyone that can find the spine of a book after all, and Evangeline must look for her love in the disaster of the Acadian North to the confluences of the American South, just as Gericault must cast men from their disaster of a raft into the Indian Ocean. 

“ _ Daily the tides of life go ebbing and flowing beside them, _ ” they would say together, their favorite part, his singing dog and him, hook mouthed and white toothed from cutting their gums on fish bones and bad taste. They can’t howl, but they can be in sync. “ _ Thousands of throbbing hearts, where theirs are at rest and forever, thousands of aching brains, where theirs no longer are busy, _ ” and maybe Doctor Lecter would frown, or maybe he would smile, and maybe he would say nothing. 

Doctor Lecter merely gestures to the paired chairs, turning one just so that the rug beneath is open and available to the coyote, withdrawn even now with their lines of Longfellow between them. The chair leg rests are imprinted into the weave - Evangeline favors one such with her delicate nails and wide tread, like she can press the shape of it instead into Turkish wool, making it yet another spot she’s roamed. 

Her ears prick up, and they both look to the railing, the thousands quiet. 

In the corner, bright as a jewel, a bird sits close to the cathedral ceiling windows, watching as intently and happily as any other but marked by the same eerie blankness of Doctor Lecter’s face. 

( _ Thirty feet apart at your observed max, and not a twitch of that curious heartsick pain that you feel closing a car door between you and Evangeline. None of that vomiting anxiety when a store clerk in small town USA refuses to let her in, insisting that he can make his purchases and meet her outside. There’s so much of you made up of other things that you can’t bear this one essential thing be anywhere but pack-tight to you, always seen. _ ) 

“Like a little space between you and your innermost self, Doctor Lecter?” Will asks, nodding to the bird. 

Hannibal smiles, placidly nodding, but does nothing to call the daemon closer. “Like many of my patients, I have an unusual daemon who is shy to introduce themselves. One might say it is the origin of my curiosity in the subject. May I ask the name of your desert-wandering friend?” 

“ _ Like a phantom she came, and passed away unremembered, _ ” Will recites with a half-smile of his own, his daemon craning her neck to press the black of her nose into his hip, amused. 

Doctor Lecter eyes are bright at this. “Your mountain-wandering maiden then.” 

There’s a fission of pleasure between Will and Evangeline at this quickness of recognition, even as there’s the desire to snarl, to tell him he’s not so smart. “My daddy wasn’t much inclined to staying in one place, but he is inclined to the occasional great American novel, and that’s all I’ll say on the subject of parents or else you’ll not have done anything hard for today’s session.” 

This prompts an easy shrug and the dark-twinkling of Doctor Lecter’s eyes, like Will has done a charming trick, or told a tired joke that sounds funnier from someone new. “Strange that you neglect Evangeline’s steadfastness and beauty.” 

“Neither is associated with coyotes, and neither is associated with the end of the story.”

“To people afraid of them, certainly,” Doctor Lecter says with a wave of his hand, and crosses his legs in his seat. “I rather see our heroine as a New World beau ideal, one with agency unlike Beatrice or Elaine of Astolat, a reverse courtly love.” 

Will favors Evangeline an affectionate look at this thought - both of them adopted the name easily, just as Will adopts his. Children together, unthinking of whether or not there ought to be significance, only learning what significance there is in hindsight. The random pick of a man deep in his drinks, and nostalgic for a person Will would never know.

“Projection is difficult to navigate when working with the public,” Will replies, hands and head still. “Pest animals, pet eaters, dangerous. Thinking she’s named for the parish because I worked in Louisiana as a cop, as if I was doing that in my infancy. I avoid them when I can.” 

“That we can’t avoid them is why we are here,” Evangeline huffs, with the smallest flex of her nails again - they rake the carpet. Rather than annoyance at this, Doctor Lecter watches her, admiringly. “Are you going to ask us next why we respond to them, or do your fingers feel safe enough on your knees to not feel the same aversion?”

“I’m a great fan of a little danger in my day-to-day. Keeps my heart rate up,” Doctor Lecter says with the slightest tilt to his mouth. “Do you think you’re a danger?” 

( _ Yes, you are in accordance together when answering between the two of you alone, but shake your heads no in company. Just like the form. _ )

“A pity if you do,” says Doctor Lecter with a beautific smile, hands still relaxed, folded at the patella, knuckles un-whitened and stressless. Both Will and Evangeline turn their heads at that. 

His admiration is noted by more than the two of them - the small daemon, who Will half-expected to stay above them ( _ “standoffish” Alana had said - snobbish says you _ ) glides down from the high perch to a new one - the shiny tip of a brogue, clasping at the laces delicately, mindful of the tied bow. 

It looks between Will and Evangeline, quick turns of the head, soundless. 

Nothing particularly out of the ordinary for a daemon to do, but Doctor Lecter turns his head thoughtfully to look at the shining bird regardless, almost suspicious. Here on the ground, the daemon is more vibrant, some sort of tropical species if a little petite for someone with as chthonic a presence as Doctor Lecter. They’re much brighter up close, dark headed but a riot of colors from the neck down - peridot, citrine, rosy reds. It seems like it should be cold if someone were to touch it, like a display necklace unwarmed by skin. 

Something passes between them, as things pass between Will and Evangeline - not meant for other ears. 

Whatever it is, they are in agreement. Doctor Lecter looks back up, warm and pleased, his suspicion averted. “I see that Donatien will be joining us for the session,” he says with a long breath in and out. The daemon bobs his head, at the tip of the foot crossed over the other, a hothouse flower against the plaid of the man’s suit. “He typically keeps to the mezzanine, or the lamp on my desk if he’s familiar with a visitor, so consider yourself most distinguished today.” 

“Always a pleasure to merit extra gawking,” Will replies blithely. 

It takes a moment, but the proverbial lightbulb in Will’s head does eventually light up while looking at the shimmering lustre of the feathers, and the white rimmed blackness of the bird daemon’s eyes. 

“Do you specifically screen for patients that are averse to parrots?” Will asks, inclined to laugh. 

Doctor Lecter leans back in his chair, lifting his foot slightly to encourage the daemon to resettle on the glass side table, scratching at the surface. Donatien warbles wordlessly to the doctor, presumably understood by each other. “I find that patients that are avid birders tend to jump to some conclusions about myself and my therapeutic methods upon meeting Donatien, regardless of references or professional referrals. I keep a small roster of people in my schedule - I needn’t fill it with people opining on their experiences with conures.” 

“Are they wrong?” Will replies. 

At this, Donatien turns his head, chirruping again, feathers fluffed outwards. Will looks at him in turn. Will doesn’t know birds, just as he said. He doesn’t know how to read them and their expressionless eyes.

It’s unusual, same sex daemons, but so too is the shape itself. Very specific, for a very specific man. Doctor Hannibal Lecter has done his best to match him in color, as though a daemon were an exciting accessory instead of a manifesto of his humanity. Black crown, white eye rings, green and tawny, and little tips of crimson at the edges. Donatien is a handsome creature, and surprisingly quiet, watching in cool observance, maybe offended at Will’s implication if he were to venture a guess. 

If he is offended, it doesn’t last more than a half-second. He flutters in a dance of color from the side table to Will’s armrest, chirruping again, a great mimic of an actual animal rather than the being of Dust that he is. He still doesn’t talk, content to press close in what suspiciously feels like retaliation. Will’s hand flexes. 

Doctor Lecter’s excitement at this is mixed with a distant awe, looking at the small green bird with extreme pointedness. Donatien, quite comfortable on the armrest of Will’s chair, ignores this as readily as Will ignores pushy clerks at department stores: no, he does not need assistance, yes, he can browse quite happily unaided, and he’ll certainly call for help if he finds himself needing anything, thank you very much. 

He’s a little brushstroke of emerald, red, and grey in the corner of Will’s eye, just...looking at him, and occasionally turning his head down to Evangeline, who’s ears have gone flat against her head in anxiousness, long paws pressed against the floor with toes flexed forward, ready to run. 

( _ She, like you, as you, has never learned to sit still under a watchful eye. How awful and terrifying it is to be observed by someone’s daemon like this, the biblical kind of awe, with your very self shivering at the scrutiny. What does he see that you don’t? Or worse, what does he see that you  _ **_do_ ** _? _ )

The name rings a bell, the more he considers it. When it hits, as the answer to the question did, he hesitantly laughs, one of those dry ones that erupt from him when awkwardness and curiosity get the better of him. 

“Your daemon is...named after the Marquis de Sade?”

There’s another lift of the corners of his mouth, Doctor Lecter smiling like he’s never quite worked out the expression beyond cool reserve, but honestly widening like he doesn’t mean it to. “Donatien is not so uncommon a French name as all that. It means ‘gift’, with the same root as donating something, which feels appropriate as there are ample times I wish I could donate  _ him _ .” 

Will considers that in a span of a few quiet moments - it makes sense. A type of parrot must feel terribly revealing to someone as closed mouthed as Doctor Lecter appears to be even if it doesn’t necessarily mean anything anymore than Evangeline’s form does. A bright sign painted to say  **_HI, I AM DIFFICULT_ ** rather than the clean appearance and calm that a professional of his stature would want to project. 

Parrots can be chatty. Parrots can be mean-spirited and selfish. Parrots can be incredibly deceitful, and you can’t tell which of any of these is brewing underneath the charming face, if anything is brewing at all. Donatien, for what it’s worth, remains as stone faced as his other self, showing none of these qualities. Will can picture it now, the unnerved first timers expecting a warm welcome and only receiving the still gaze of the small creature above, aloof, unchallenged. 

( _ “Daemons aren’t a true reflection of their animal counterparts,” says a professor that later avoids you and Evangeline during office hours. _ )

Will looks down at the tiny feet, walking the leather of the chair, only just barely missing the fine hairs of his arm and where he’s rolled his sleeves up to the elbow. Donatien seems not at all bothered by any of these near transgressions, instead taking in Will’s appearance and unflinching limb - wanting to make it flinch, Will thinks, curious if he can bite, if that’s the same kind of taboo as something done lovingly with a touch, as though bites aren’t loving too.

( _ An irreverent man, with an irreverent daemon, who wants to pull your strings, thinks Evangeline through the tether, wet at the mouth with repressed force, like she could snap her jaw like a trap and the discomfort of Donatien so near to them would be resolved. _ ) 

“But that’s not why he’s named Donatien,” Will replies, feeling the thrill of crushing something under his tongue, sweating but meeting the eyes of the man across from him despite it. He’s not sure if that’s his thought, or Evangeline’s, or an impression from the threat that sits close to his wrist, challenging him. 

Doctor Lecter’s smile gains teeth this time, as charmed as the bird’s little face like Will and Evangeline have done exactly as they think, a match in this as they are in suits and colors. 

“No,” he concedes, as one tallies points. “He’s not.” 

“ _ In order to know virtue, we must first acquaint ourselves with vice _ ,” whispers the bird, low and rich-voiced, amused. A quote - parroting, perhaps something Doctor Lecter has read to him of his namesake. Will recognizes it. It would be cute in a pet, but is unnerving with the cunning of a man with two doctorates behind it, cognizant of what it’s saying, making fun of them.

“Only then can we know the true measure of a man,” Will replies, finishing the statement, watching the daemon with a puzzled look.

They sit on that for a moment, Donatien a beam of heat next to his arm, Doctor Lecter’s eyes the unyielding gaze of a statue. 

The daemon hops from chair to sleeve fabric, to the pocket of Will’s shirt, Will barely managing more than a gasp as he does it. He weighs no more than a cup of water, but sits like a king at his throne, and he is  _ heavy _ . 

Evangeline leaps up from her seat on the floor, head turning back wildly, thinking in tandem with Will:  _ you can’t do that. We can’t do that. _

Still, the daemon persists, closer than any has come, even his daddy’s. The mute chaos of lava turned to rock, steaming under ocean water.

( _ You imagine him plucking at your ribs. You think  _ **_he’s_ ** _ thinking of plucking at your ribs, and you’ve stumbled into their mind because that’s how close he’s flirting with breaking the rules. His claws are lightning rods past the fishing shirt, past the white tee beneath that, carried as surely as electrical currents to your heart, and Doctor Hannibal Lecter stands on the other side of a thin wall, warbling in kind, message warped by the mass and the distance. _ ) 

The shock wears off, even if the growing ringing in his ears doesn’t, and Will has to grind his nails into the leather of the chair’s arms to keep himself from anxiously pushing the daemon away. Beneath him, Evangeline is crouched but standing, head whipping between Will and Doctor Lecter.

Technically, clothes separate them. No rules violated, other than ones of propriety, as if they had watched a person run naked through the office, but without injury or the reach of someone’s hands into their mind. Will wonders what the two of them are trying to prove, if they’re trying to embarrass him and Evangeline. With his arms in the air, held away like he’s holding a grenade, he certainly feels foolish.  _ Are you a bird enthusiast _ indeed. 

( _ His feathers will be soft, comes the thought. He will be like holding a radiating stone, hot with magnetism, and you flex your fingers again at the idea, not to crush but to touch. _ ) 

“A little casual heresy before the evening meal?” Will says breathlessly, and Evangeline, despite the tension and the searing discomfort, is too nervous to do anything but give out anxious yips of amusement. It’s nice, having someone that laughs at all his jokes. Her mouth is still foaming with hunger. The whites of her eyes are rolling. 

“As befits the marquis,” Doctor Lecter replies, a little breathless and grey himself, but looking at Evangeline as one does sunsets, and great waves, and his eyes crashing against either in unflinching attention. His hands are still relaxed on his knee. 

He eventually turns his head to Will again, looking sheepish. “I do apologize, Will, he’s not usually this forward with people,” he adds, eyes prying at the little feet clutched in another person’s shirt, like this is a child misbehaving rather than a gross overstep. 

“Said something I shouldn’t have?” Will asks, aghast at his calm.

Doctor Lecter smiles with big teeth again. “On the contrary, I think you’ve flattered him terribly.”

But still, Doctor Lecter does nothing. Maybe surprised as Will and Evangeline are, but no, the more he consider it, the more certain this is what the daemon and Doctor Lecter wove between them in unseen words. Intrigued then at Donatien’s curiosity, intrigued enough to ignore the discomfort, or to lean into it like a pleasure. Will can respect that the way he can respect his own daemon licking blood from his hands, giggling at his aim, people in a dead sprawl on the kitchen floor as if that wasn’t someone’s tragedy played out in full. 

Will feels that too, like a brick on his heart, shielding it from small claws, prying eyes.

Words pass between them again outloud this time, the bird and the man - foreign, sharp, not at all the French that Will would expect, unlike the name. Donatien flares his tail feathers, slaps his wings forward just close enough to Will that it’s as if he’s been raked by something burning, and carries himself back to Doctor Lecter, hanging on the breast pocket of the suit there like it’s where he was meant to be. 

Doctor Lecter smooths the iridescence of Donatien’s back with a thoughtful finger, cheeks gone ruddy with returned heat. He looks like he’s had a drink, or stepped too close to a fire.

( _ Not so unaffected by the distance after all. _ ) 

It’s like coming up for air, even if the press of another’s consciousness recedes into tinnitus, leaving a blank rather than an impression. The weight lifted. The warbling gone. Will misses it, the way one gets accustomed to trains passing in the night.

“Always nice, being recognized for a literal sadist,” Will says with a long sigh, looking across the room to the bird who in turn looks up with darkling eyes, shining. There are no more quotes for him now, just that cool calculation. “Not a lot of respect for respectable conventions either.” 

Whatever he’s looking for, he must find it. He retreats to the mezzanine, back to the corner he idled in at first glance. “Always nice being recognized for what we are,” Doctor Lecter corrects, turning to look at his own daemon with a calculating interest. “Forgive me Will, if you wish to stop here, we can.” 

“No, it’s fine,” Will says without thinking, and surprisingly it is. From the floor, Evangeline yawns, eyes still wide. 

( _ “Isn’t he embarrassed?” “No, I don’t think he is.” Over and over and there’s something about that keeping you in your seat, thinking of feathers narrowly not striking your chest. _ )

They have a proper session after that against all odds - odds being Will stomping out of the room, fingers curled up on themselves to keep from reaching out. Odds being Doctor Lecter proffering a referral letter to literally anyone that hasn’t had a close brush with their daemon skipping introductions to go straight to branding the quills and barbs of their glowing brand of a body into a patient. 

Very unorthodox of him. 

“I think you’d best call me Hannibal,” says Doctor Lecter with a dry laugh, and while Will can’t quite manage that intimacy after hearing the edges of another person’s thoughts like blood thundering from behind the muffled flesh of a ribcage, Doctor Lecter still calls him Will, and favors Evangeline with the occasional question, pleased with her graceless, bare-toothed interjections. They talk of Will’s job for a while, of Alana’s recommendation, why they would think Will’s unstable, why Will would think Will’s unstable, and Will cheekily asks if he’d like an annotated list. Doctor Lecter replies in turn that yes, but only if it’s what Will and Evangeline think, not other people.

( _ No one to sing with, Evangeline pants between them, no safe place to roam, but you’d never betray her honesty like that even if she would with ease. You’d never betray yourself when you’ve gotten so good at hiding that from other people. _ ) 

Donatien doesn’t look at them for the rest of the session, but instead warbles low and soft between the distance of himself and the other himself, because that’s what people are to their daemons and it’s an accident of nature they are not one body and Doctor Hannibal Lecter can hear his chatter through any structure.

The late afternoon sun glints on Donatien’s breast, celadon bright, and Will finds himself wondering at the texture again. Evangeline, next to him, wonders the same. 

( _ What Doctor Lecter hears of you through the wall through Donatien, you don’t know and you don’t ask. _ ) 

\---

“He touched you, that daemon.” 

Will looks to Evangeline, pacing on the patio, restless between the wooden railing between her and the snow and the dogs bounding around in joy even in the dark of the night. She’s not spoken since they leave their appointment, eyes wild between Will and Hannibal Lecter’s hands, tidy and casual, clasped at the point of the patella, tan and veined against the plaid of the suit pants.

“Not really, not bare flesh to Dust, if that’s what you’re worked up about.” 

“What did you hear?” she asks. 

Will sees her ears, as far back as they can go, but not looking at him, but rather the dark rise of the trees at the edge of the property, the ruff of her neck gone golden from the light behind. 

“Nothing I could understand,” he replies. 

“And if you had touched? Bare flesh to Dust?” 

Will doesn’t answer that because he’s not sure he knows. They dream of voices down a hall of closed doors, the portal to the woods beyond the front step waiting and cold and full of things that live in it. 

\---

Will has had the instruction, read the papers, and made the lectures himself: daemons, while animal-like, are not animals. In turn, their counterparts should not be expected to exhibit animal behaviors, even if assumptions of affinity can be drawn from nature. It’s driven into profiling like a sharp stick - you can make some connections based on species observation alone, but don’t make too many. That madman you’ve been hunting has a doe for a daemon. That madwoman you’ve chased through the crowd of a festival street took the shape of a koi fish at age 11, and has been swimming placid circles ever since. Will Graham’s coyote daemon has never bit anyone, howled at the moon, or gone rabid and white mouthed. 

( _ She desperately wants to, every person that’s ever written her off, which means you do too, but keep saying that thing you’ve gotten used to saying for old times sake. “One of these days,” people joke over cubicles, and you and her laugh with them, aping the words “one of these days.” _ ) 

Parrots, particularly conures Will observes in a desperate attempt to gather information in the face of his own daemon education, in addition to being chatty, mean-spirited, selfish, and deceitful, are also very inclined to bond with exactly one person, and damn every other living thing that draws breath that tries to come between them. He disregards this at first reading as typical of social animals like parrots, of which Donatien is technically not. 

Donatien, and by extension Doctor Hannibal Lecter who is unable to describe why in words despite having an enviable arsenal of them in multiple languages, or is unwilling to, seems to have chosen Will as an object of fixation in a complete upset to either man’s life, or at least is making a mockery of it. 

It starts with Jack Crawford inviting Doctor Lecter to consult with them, to act as a buffer between Will and the general public. “He doesn’t seem to mind Evangeline,” says Jack, “and I like that he keeps you on task.” That’s true, Hannibal is notably comfortable around the coyote, standing next to her when she pulls herself to the edge of a room, observing safely away from others, but far enough from Will to feel like a bowstring pulled tight. They both survey with the same kind of eyes. Fixated on Will. Some comment hiding behind their lips, his thin and pink, hers black and long. 

Donatien, of course, does not also observe from a great distance. 

Donatien would like to be as up close and personal with Will’s observations as he can. Will begins to suspect that if it wouldn’t be a massive indication that Hannibal Lecter should be arrested, Donatien would crawl up into Will’s eyes and become a third one, looking outwards, seeing, but sharing nothing. 

( _ The first time you think this is the first time you think that perhaps Hannibal and Donatien are not so strange a pair as everyone else professes them to be. From his corner of the room, a tall well-dressed figure next to the roughness of Evangeline who looks fit for a taxidermist’s bench on her worst days, and underfed and mean on her best, you think Hannibal Lecter might want to cut a hole between those muffled walls you heard before to let the sound travel more easily. _ )

( _ Background check comes back clean. You’re scolded for misusing agency resources. Evangeline stands with him all the same, suspicions aside. _ ) 

Each time Hannibal is called to consult alongside Will, so too does Donatien appear like an enthusiastic and overly large boutonniere on the front on Will’s shirt, clinging to the button flap like the closure hole was designed specifically for him to hook his little clawed foot into and blink with shiny black eyes up at Will. Each time this happens, Evangeline paces, but doesn’t press between them as would be her right. She watches. She considers the taste of Dust exploding in her mouth. Will considers the taste of blood in his. 

“He’s trying to make you uncomfortable to see what you’ll do,” Hannibal says while they gaze down at a particularly messy scene, striding up to stand next to him. Will’s eyes are pointed towards it, but his mind is fixated on the slow progression of the daemon from pocket to shoulder to suspiciously close to the collarline, licking phantom iron from his gums. 

“Great, I would have never guessed,” Will replies, blinking furiously down into the image of red and viscera below. The round head and yellow beak in the periphery are a sore thumb. “I don’t know why he has to do it in abject silence though,” he adds. 

“Donatien hasn’t been much inclined to talk since I was very young. He can be sociable, but rarely is by nature.” 

( _ An incident, you posit. Something that silences loud birds, a decades long trauma that plays court with parties, academics, colleagues, but has no patience to invest beyond the surface level. Hannibal must hate his peers, and their curious looks at his daemon, just as you hate yours and their unkind speculation at Evangeline’s rough coat, the whites of her eyes, the shyness of company. Too obvious in her panting, breathless discomfort, where Hannibal’s is too unknowable in his, alien and reptilian. _ ) 

“I have to say, he’s aptly named,” Will swallows. “I can’t say this is comfortable therapy.” 

“Most of the good kind isn’t,” Hannibal says blithely in reply. “It’s uncommon for such closeness between daemons and other humans that aren’t lovers or close family, but he appears to be minding himself, if challenging you in how he does it... Does it make you nervous, being so close to someone else’s inner self?” 

When Will looks at them, Hannibal is smiling inscrutably. Donatien stares up at Will unmoved by his distress, enamoured as ever.

“That is the most hamfisted parallel to my issues with empathy that could be brute forced into this conversation without literally saying it,” Will returns with a severe frown. “Why aren’t  _ you _ uncomfortable with how up close and personal  _ your _ inner self is getting with me?”

Doctor Lecter looks between Donatien and Will’s face, the disturbing brush of glossy green and red feathers with ghost-fingered strength at the edges of Will’s hair. There’s that muddled whispering again, the near-miss of their minds talking so close to Will. Hannibal says nothing aloud, but neither does he reject the question. 

“What would you call this?” Will continues. “Some kind of exposure trial by fire? 

“ _ In order to know virtue, we must first acquaint ourselves with vice, _ ” Donatien whispers into his hair. 

This too happens every time. Donatien never says anything else. Will’s tried quoting the entirety of Justine to him to see if perhaps he simply needs to show his familiarity with Donatien’s spiritual mentor, but still, the same line over and over again.

Will shakes his head, feels a curl catch on the grey beak, feels himself shiver, and Donatien shiver in turn. When he opens his eyes, Doctor Lecter is pained in a way the stretch of his tether never has done to him, no matter the distance or how far he stands at the edges. A glancing blow, but one that strikes a mark. 

( _ You’ve thought about this before, what someone touching your daemon would be like. What if someone grabs her? What if they do as the ranch hands in the backcountry farms do, and wring her pretty, bristled neck, leave her out on a fence to dissipate into Dust, the brilliant kind, because even if they think she’s a pest, she’s still made of the same stuff as all the others? But also what if they see the two of you, and grab your essence by the jaws and the ruff of Evangeline’s long, twisting body and insist on grabbing everything else they can when they know that’s the best way to have you, more sure than fatherhood, fraternity, partnership, sex, marriage, respect? _ )

As Jack approaches, Donatien flutters away, his transgressions unseen to sit flower-bright on the peaked lapel of Hannibal’s suit. Will closes his eyes again, and finds he cannot explain the crime scene after all, while Evangeline watches on, bony shouldered, head low, considering the pair that leave her distance, but never him. Never him.

( _ What if she gave you to someone, some returned betrayal for pretending to not be the same as her, when you always were despite your best efforts? _ )

“Does he say anything else?” he asks, not forgetting it’s rude to assume, but with nothing else to ask. 

“He certainly does, when the occasion calls for it,” replies Doctor Lecter, “but it seems to be what he wants to share with you for the time being.” 

\---

Car rides between them are historically a safe space where they can say what they think, and the wind of the highway will blow the words away. 

“What would you do if I touched Doctor Lecter the way that Donatien touches you?” 

Will sucks at the soft insides of his cheeks, and chews them carefully between blunt molars. Hard enough to ground him, but not so hard as to hurt. “Are you curious about that?” 

“I’m curious what you heard.” 

“I told you, not much, nothing understandable.” 

( _ A lie. You sensed the desire to bite you before the daemon even landed on you. You sensed that they whispered through the ephemeral strand of the tether to each other like a tendon stretched from bone to essential bone. _ )

Evangeline flexes her paws, and shakes the chill from her shoulder. “I just...want to know what it’s like. Being heard.” 

Will doesn’t reply. It feels like being naked, he wants to say, having someone see how much he wishes someone would pull her long ears the way he does, to let her throw her head back and be heard and there be no recommendations of therapy, evaluations, murder. 

“Doesn’t everyone?” Will deflects, and clenches his fingers on the steering wheel. Flight feathers move his hair. Claws pull snags from the pocket of his shirt. The road to Wolf Trap is long and without disturbance, and the night that follows after, even if Evangeline does stare out from the porch railing again, waiting for something. 

\--- 

Will and Evangeline begin to spend more time in the company of the good doctor and his cheeky but largely wordless daemon than in the company of Alana, or his students, or even Jack Crawford. The consultations become more sessions to discuss the consultations. The sessions turn into dinner, because Hannibal insists on rewarding his long drive from Virginia to Baltimore with his favorite hobby. 

“I must insist that you stay seated,” Hannibal says, balancing silver trays and wine glasses between his fingers, native to him as much as the three piece suits, and the shiny brogues, and Donatien like a spill of ivy on his shoulder stained with blood. 

( _ When Hannibal leaves the room, Donatien rolls in the living herb wall until he is fresh with the smell of basil and oregano and the pungent particular odor of Dust, potassium chlorate and sulfur, a shiny matchstick ready to ignite. “In order to know virtue, we must first acquaint ourselves with vice,” says the daemon smelling of garden and wantonly pressing the leaves, and you turn your head to let him hop from wall, to shoulder, to tabletop, hands fisted on the table to avoid reaching up to catch him. _ )

“I think it might be better if I helped,” Will says after a second trip out of the room brings Hannibal with a bottle of wine, but still no food. “Can’t be convenient to concentrate on a stove with your daemon taking a roll in the planter out of sight.”

“But alas, never out of mind,” Hannibal rejoins, clinking a wine glass against Will’s, a mellow Sauvignon Blanc swirling in the bottom. 

“Certainly never that,” Will rasps, and feels the thought of bites and tiny bruises, the muffled whispers through the walls asking how best to make them when the daemon presses briefly against him. 

Hannibal seems to consider that, dark eyes bright even in the low light of the room. This is another thing he and Donatien share readily, perhaps so full of thoughts that they spill over his sandy blonde and brown eyelashes as an amphora full of water flows to the floor.

( _ You’ve always thought it was Donatien who has the vicious mouth, but these days as Hannibal watches you over a cutting board, dicing onions like you do bait, you think maybe it’s him. Your gut is warm at the prospect. _ )

“Tonight something fresh from the field,” Hannibal begins when they at last return to the dining room from the kitchen. They sit across from each other at the long dinner table, an attractive dish of field morels, butter-braised root vegetables, and chestnuts between them with a long loin of meat nestled into the center. “Seasonality should always be considered for quality.” 

While Donatien doesn’t eat, content to watch from Hannibal’s shoulder, Hannibal does bring a bone china plate for Evangeline, long raw pieces of their protein for the night laid out in pretty red sections. 

“She doesn’t normally eat,” Will explains when Evangeline initially hesitates, sitting beneath the greenery, but slavering once more. He doesn’t want Hannibal to be offended if she slinks away. She doesn’t leave saliva as a real coyote would, but Will winces at each drip, more telling than the last. “Maybe a particularly satisfying trout catch on occasion.”

Hannibal seems to find this amusing, the obviousness of her interest, and the defensiveness of Will’s voice. “Nonsense,” Hannibal says, spreading a linen napkin in his lap, looking fondly down to the dish that sits at the end of the table, but just so slightly closer to him. I’ve chosen tonight’s entree with her specifically in mind, if she’ll have it.”

“What’s in season?” 

“Rabbit,” says Hannibal with a small smile, pressing a hand down the front of his waistcoat, settling in with his cutlery. “A particularly satisfying catch of my own, if I do say so, and an appropriate supper for our Acadian lady is,” he adds with a tip of the head to Evangeline, who has pressed her nose to the floor, just shy of the plate, interested but careful not to contradict Will.

( _ “Ours, he calls me,” Evangeline whispers to you, licking her chops, and even you can’t disguise the strange warmth you feel at that, a strange ray of heat unto yourself and a burning brick of lead to match the daemon on the tablecloth’s weight. “Don’t get ahead of yourself,” you say, petrified to misunderstand the gesture and afraid she already has. _ ) 

She noses the edges, until she eats the first tender cut, swinging it up and behind her eyeteeth. 

There’s a pause, where she looks at Hannibal, closer right now than Will, with a keen eye that has a question in it. Hannibal says nothing, twirling a fork between his fingers in what would be fidgeting on anyone else, but is excitement in him. 

Evangeline eats everything quickly after, and Hannibal and Will start their meal long after the phantom wet spots of her famished mouth evaporate into the wood of the floor. While Donatien watches Will with a similar attentiveness, as he always does, they seem more satisfied at Evangeline’s meal, and how she turns in circles afterwards, sleeping in a small round of fur, and a relaxed brow unbothered by their conversation.

She looks at Hannibal curiously from time to time, and never properly thanks him, but Hannibal acts as if she has. 

\---

“I hope you both enjoyed dinner,” says Hannibal when they leave. Never one to fish for compliments, Will looks at him somewhat confused. It’s not as if this is the first night they’ve done this, even if it is a first for Evangeline. 

“My compliments to the chef,” Will says with a half-smile. “I don’t know if anything I’ve had here has been anything less than stellar, tonight included.”

The doctor takes his praise modestly, shrugging, asking if he can’t interest Will in a glass of cognac next to the fire to let the meal rest, but Will shakes his head and excuses them with responsibilities and class planning and all the things he’s gotten good at pushing aside for these little meetings. 

Evangeline still says nothing, but she often says nothing, so Will doesn’t think any further of it, only that she is strangely content when her eyes aren’t darting between Hannibal and Donatien. Donatien sends them off with his usual regards - a tired line, delivered a dozen of a dozen times to Will. 

\---

It’s on another afternoon like the first afternoon that Will begins to realize that Evangeline is at ease around Hannibal. “Doctor Lecter,” she still says, as does Will, mentally calling him by his real name, but on the edge of feeling it’s inappropriate out loud. If he starts, he doesn’t think he’ll stop, and what will Jack and Alana think of that?

( _ “I think it’s nice that they got along - we always thought they would,” says Hazel, long claws of his pawed hand raking the shaggy guard hairs near his neck lazily, contradictory to Alana’s somewhat pinched look. They are of two minds in this, and you watch them, but you don’t look at their manes anymore. You haven’t thought about them since Donatien teases at the reality of that, fine filaments of emerald and ruby closer than the black of Alana’s hair has ever been. _ )

( _ Would Hannibal’s hair tickle your neck as feathers do? Would the hard sharpness of a beak be comparable to his clenching jaw, working around the skin of your fingers? _ ) 

“You seem bothered, Will,” says Hannibal, hands over crossed legs, daemon sitting on the arm of the chair, coal-hot and happy next to Will’s wrist. It’s almost muscle memory to simply pick him up to hang on his pocket as one puts a favorite pen away, like Donatien has merely forgotten what the next step in their visit is and needs direction.

The impulse is as bothering as his mood, and equally related. 

“I’m not sure I understand the goal of this,” Will says, looking up into the mezzanine rather than the man’s face, or to the dark eyes considering the little hairs on the back of his wrist, how easily a bird could pull them. “You’ve presumably told Jack I’m safe for public spaces, but maybe not safe enough for closer bureau examination.”

Hannibal doesn’t move, waiting for Will to continue. 

Will does, now that the words are flowing. In for a penny, in for a pound. “No ‘how do you feel about that’ or ‘how many stable relationships have you had’ to correct it. Just...your daemon taking liberties, and us chatting about literature, or cases, or whatever other pursuit is on topic for the evening. It’s not typical, whatever it is.” 

“The highest compliment you’ve paid me,” Hannibal says, switching the cross of his knees. “If you’d like an explanation, it’s really quite simple. Donatien doesn’t see it as part of a therapeutic process at all, but instead a question he wanted answered.” 

“And you gave permission to ask,” Will replies, shrugging. 

Hannibal doesn’t deny it, looking pleased as he sometimes does with Will. He licks his lips, considering his next question. “Allowing our daemons to experiment with desires is as validating as exploring our own. They’re us, after all.” 

Laying in a patch of sunlight, Evangeline lies still, listening with closed eyes. She’s never complained about feeling cold before, but she’s never turned down the conventionality of a wild thing’s creature comforts, even though she’s welcome on every chair, bed, and blanket in the house. Hannibal’s even offered her the chaise lounge before, but she takes to a shaft of afternoon that comes between the curtains if she noses them just so. 

Will extends his thoughts to hers, and the hierarchy of feelings there. 

( _ Pace the boundaries of the room to establish territory. Mind your words. Make sure your actions are tied, even if you like to provide a polite plausible deniability why you need to do the things that you do, and why she’s more canid than daemon despite the science, and people notice, and she’s tired but quiet because they must be. _ ) 

“The desires of daemons can be every bit as flawed as their human partner’s desires,” Will rejoins. “I don’t indulge mine.” 

“Don’t you though?” challenges Hannibal. “Every time you allow someone else’s daemon to get that close to your thoughts, and yours to theirs?” 

( _ Yes, you do. _ ) 

Will chooses to deflect, guilty at that thought even if it’s only fully him and Evangeline that hear it. She only creases her eyes against the light, familiar with this self-denial. “Can’t stand not having a direct answer any more?” 

“Goals for a satisfactory experiment require some sort of metric - your opinion is as valued of one as I can hope for.” 

“Are you trying to see what I’ll do? If the temptation will get the better of me?” asks Will. “Or do you think that I’m embarrassed of how my daemon behaves, and you want to show me the alternative where yours does whatever he wants to?”

Hannibal smiles at this, casting a look at the coyote laying on her side, appearing to be perfectly content to ignore them, but fixated on them. Will suspects Hannibal knows this. Ever since their dinner together, Hannibal seems to know a lot of what Evangeline will and won’t do, or tolerate, or try out. 

( _ You think she walks a few steps behind him sometimes, rather than a few steps ahead of you, like she wants to get close enough to smell his shoes where Donatien likes to land, or get the lay of the lands that he chooses to walk in lieu of her own inability to do so. Donatien is curious what Will tolerates, but she perhaps is curious in turn what Hannibal would indulge. _ ) 

When the other man turns back to face Will, Will’s not sure what his face looks like, only that Hannibal’s softens in a kindly way. 

“Those are  _ your _ hypotheses, Will,” he says. “Donatien merely thought that you and Evangeline were interesting, as do I. That you have allowed him his trespasses only made us more certain of that.”

Kindness hurts in a way that blunt comments and criticism don’t. Donatien’s tail feathers brush a knuckle as he turns to fly back to his favorite place on the waxed laces of Hannibal’s shoes, and Will shudders, as does Hannibal. 

“I  _ am _ intrigued why you allow it though,” Hannibal adds, closing his eyes briefly. 

Will looks to Evangeline again, cheeks gone red with the radiation of another person’s being. A sunburn, or gamma passing through cells to tear them and reform with someone else’s gravity. “I hear the two of you as water running over my head,” he says “Muffled, intrusive, but incomprehensible. Empathy isn’t like that. Empathy is writing in the gaps in the story, not filling it like a vase.” 

“And what do you think, from the impressions that you get?” 

“That you’re exactly what Donatien’s nature would suggest, and I just haven’t gotten close enough yet to see what that means.”

“Oh Will,” says Hannibal with a winning grin, the bird daemon slowly working his way up his arm from relaxed hand, to forearm, to elbow, to the broad point of a shoulder. “I would say exactly the same of you.” 

“ _ In order to know virtue, we must first acquaint ourselves with vice _ ,” says Donatien, who is tired of saying it. 

Will, who is tired of hearing it, nods and leaves with Evangeline, declining dinner for the night even as his and Evangeline’s throats grow tight at the thought, getting too accustomed to saying what they think in the other pair’s company, and afraid what it means if that has to stop. 

\---

“They’re hiding something,” says Will out loud, the hum of the car engine a drone. “The proximity is a dare.” 

Four exits pass before anything more is said - it’s all headlights and green highway signs, and the relentless press of urban to suburban on either side of them, good people of the commonwealth of Maryland and Virginia settling down in their single family homes to rest their heads for the night while wild creatures like them prowl between dens. 

“I am now too,” says Evangeline, and stares with wide yellow eyes, afraid that maybe even now, Will might become like the rest - unknown to her, and her unknown to him. “And I like the proximity.” 

“You’ve never hidden anything before now,” he says with a sigh.

“That’s not true at all. At least with the exception of you.”

Another four exits, this time in resentful calm. 

“I know,” he says, and pulls the ear closest to him, and how soft the undercoat is between pinna and downy forehead. She’s never been anything other than a comfort to him, his fingers held gently in her bites and her snarls. She shuts her eyes, and rumbles with the engine. 

\--- 

Three sessions, two cases, and three dinners follow after for a nice symmetrical progression of events. They are always welcomed at _The Raft of the Medusa_ , man hanging over man in a scrabbling attempt to survive, Hannibal always leaning out the office doorway like he’s greeting them home from a long week of work, the tiny conure flying out to circle and sometimes land on Evangeline. A strange barrier, that. The coyote listens to his warbles that never form a sentence other than his standard refrain, but still, Will’s wandering self understands him in a way Will hasn’t fully. 

The herbs grow steadily even in the winter chill, vibrant under ultraviolet lights and Donatien’s searching, delicate claws. They talk of everything unnecessary and arbitrary until that is exhausted, and then they talk of each other, but not work. People continue to die, because that’s what they do, with or without external forces. They get calls from the lab with updates. They continue to make people wonder. 

_ (“So once Donatien’s tired himself out on vices, do we move on to passions and pain as a vehicle for sex, or is that getting too much into historically lewd French philosophers rather than daemons, namesakes or not?” you ask, thinking it’ll be cute - look how much you know about Justine and The 120 Days of Sodom. Look how you keep pace with him in your sportswear and your ill-kempt hair, and with your crazy-eyed coyote. “Must one do violence to the object of one's desire, so that when it surrenders, the pleasure is greater?”  _ )

( _“We can discuss that right now if you’d like,” Hannibal replies, too close to your ear to be anything but a strong suggestion rather than a concession. You turn red the way that the scrape of feathers on your neck does it to you, and Hannibal just watches, dark eyed as his daemon._ _With Donatien on the roll of your sleeve now, but not so much as an embrace between you and Hannibal, you_ have _rather done this whole thing backwards, haven’t you?_ ) 

Will’s suspicions never begin breaking ground for the sheer reason that he doesn’t want to know what he’s suspicious of. He’s hesitant to ask. If he asks Hannibal directly, there’s always a chance that he gets a direct answer as he did before, and his heart quails at honesty like that after so long of forcing it out for others, sweeping the grave dirt from Will’s obfustications that are resting just beneath it. 

Evangeline, however, isn’t hesitant to approach the counters of Hannibal’s Baltimore house, looking for her white plate, now becoming a regular thing. There’s a time or two when Hannibal hesitates putting it down for her, like he’d like to stroke the ruff of her neck when she tucks in, satisfied with her gratitude but not quite sure what Will would do if he did, or what she would do either. 

She never gives him that long look again after the first time, at least not for the food - Will thinks maybe she can feel his hesitant fingers, not because she will bite him as everyone else is concerned about, but that he wants to tweak the white of her chin and her cheeks, and she does give him a thoughtful consideration after those. 

( _ “Would you be upset if he did?” she asks you at night, and you don’t know how to answer without being a liar and a hypocrite. She gets enough of that from you. _ )

It’s another dinner that Will connects the dots, a full month after Evangeline has, which means at some point Will did too and kept lying to himself there as well. 

Will spends more time in the kitchen with Hannibal these days, trusted to do prepwork when they come straight from the office to the house. Hannibal doesn’t believe in meal planning - there are no such things as pre-sliced carrots that are ready to be thrown into a pan, or pre-poached stone fruits with skin ready to fall off, so each of these small steps must be accomplished after office hours. As Will doesn’t particularly care for dining Spanish style after the reasonable working man’s hour of 9 pm, he is happy to help. 

He is thinly slivering green onions in pretty green rounds that match the color of Donatien’s back, little hoops that try to slide away on the wood of the cutting board. It’s raining on this occasion, and Hannibal is of a mind to have something quick - “Just a warming pho with some bone stock I’ve been slow cooking all day.” 

“You don’t strike me as the crock-pot sort,” Will says with a sip of sweet riesling, which he has been told will compliment the heavy fats and five spice flavor of the beef and broth with a jaunty pour and twist of the wrist. A small droplet falls from the wine bottle’s mouth, chilly on the back of Will’s hand. 

“I have it on good authority that it is the appliance of the working American,” Hannibal laughs, stirring with a ladle and spooning in a pinch of chopped anise. “Even I can concede to not having the time to simmer bones until their marrow leeches into the stock when I have a full book on Wednesdays.” 

“Can’t get a proper flavor if you heat it too quickly,” Will adds as a joke. “Rookie mistake - the bones just crack or explode.” 

Evangeline laughs below. So too does Hannibal, in his usual reserved way. He laughs at Will’s jokes with the same readiness as the daemon, albeit without the hysterical note that a coyote can breathe into cold midnight air. He’s  _ in on it _ this way. Nothing worth holding separate or sacred when you’ve seen death a dozen of a dozen times over in the lab, or in the morgue, or in the closed doors of hospital rooms where things didn’t resolve as planned. 

It’s maybe that thought that clues Will in to give a proper look. 

Hannibal is between the prep table and counter, over and over to add spices, herbs, little fatty cutlets of meat that have gone salty and soft from cooking the tenderloin. ( _ “Beef,” you’re told. “Quite the cow amongst the herd.” _ ) He’s rolled the white sleeves of his shirt up and put on an apron to protect it and the dark green of his waistcoat beneath it, but otherwise is sure handed and easy in his movements between. He would have made a great chef, or a dancer, or a sailor even, talented with the dozens of small actions that are at home on the range as much as the tacking of a boat’s sails. 

Evangeline’s eyes watch each slice of tenderloin - the whites of her eyes show now, as they did in the Hobbs’ kitchen, licking blood from Will’s hands, giggling in her unknowable long tongued way. 

( _ “They’re hiding something.” “I am now too.” _ ) 

Will blinks, and watches Hannibal return to his crock-pot, silver sided and tidy. 

Another stir of the ladle - with it this time comes a segment of bone in the shiny broth, with the terminating articulation of a ball-and-socket, but otherwise sawed into tidy segments three inches long. Nothing to obsess over certainly, perfectly commonplace in every way. Except for the size. Except for the roundness of it. Femoral. 

( _ “As I understand it, the cuisine was the point of contention.” “Everyone’s a critic.” _ )

Will says nothing, staring at it, before turning away to chop some more onions before he’s seen. 

There’s the temptation to say “aha!” - his intuition ( _ and hers - she’s you _ ) has always been good. Not everything that the books of legal institutions proclaim is right. Not every righteous man is without stain, though Hannibal has always had one, green and red and sharp handed all over.

From the kitchen floor, standing attentively as any dog next to Hannibal but in Will’s sight, Evangeline stares at him instead of the rhythmic thin slicing of the tenderloin into perfect rounds that Hannibal returns to, pink and red from smoking the meat. Next to Will, overseeing the prep and comfortable on the edge of a ceramic bowl as he watches the rhythmic rocking of a santoku into the vegetables, Donatien does as well. 

“ _ Here no hungry winter congeals our blood like the rivers, _ ” says Hannibal, placing the china on the floor before Evangeline, a small pool of broth beneath the rounds of meat. Her pleasure at his consideration comes off her in long waves, the kind that pass through walls and space to be felt miles away. He very nearly catches the side of her snout when he pulls his hand back.

Unfearful human touch in exchange for expertly prepared human meat. It was her secret from him after all - a taste of a trophy, three long strips of whatever type of person constitutes the description of rabbit. 

( _ Or maybe the secret is that she enjoyed it that first time, and every time after. You certainly did, cooked as it was, but she takes a nibble as someone without appetite, compliments the chef with her knowledge but not her words, and tears into the rest like it might be taken away from her. _ ) 

The pho is served with long white porcelain spoons, and chopsticks, and bowls that slope in hard angles upward where it’s hard to see past its walls once a person sets to the task of eating. Will doesn’t look up, watching the iridescence of fat swim along the surface, thin noodles gathering up the chopped garnishes and herbs with grace, the meat tender with every bite. It’s good. It was made for them. It’s been a long time since they’ve known someone who would do that for them. 

They’ve never known someone that they could trust their voice to, and maybe it’s this that keeps Will eating when he can’t see Hannibal’s face beyond the full moon face of his dish, and Evangeline’s greasy black lips, cleaned carefully with long paws, and overgrown nails.

\---

“You knew it, that first time,” Will says to the darkness of the living room. 

The darkness of the living room, and Evangeline in it, rises from where she has pressed herself against the biggest of the dogs, feeling closer to them following her meal than Will, who is still digesting mentally and physically. “I felt it, through you and Donatien when he passed your shoulder,” she whispers. “I suspected on the first bite, but I was certain on the second.” 

“You can’t hear through other people’s daemons,” he says unnecessarily. “You don’t know what men taste like.” 

( _ You  _ **_can_ ** _ hear through your person touching another person’s daemon. _ ) 

“I have,” she corrects, “in small, splattered doses. But I can hear as much as you can hear and that you’ll share,” she says, uncertain. “Which ones we could guess at, like it’s a song we forgot the words to.” She doesn’t move for a while after that, beyond view of the glow of the porch lights through the windows, and the digital clock on the bookshelf. The eyeshine of her face is nowhere to be seen.

“It’s been so long since I’ve sang. I like them. They are like us,” she says, when Will thinks he’ll fall asleep and she will too. “They are both how they appear and not. What’s the rest of the details but practicality and something for them to laugh about?” 

Will has to think about that too. 

( _ As long as it’s not you - you don’t think you could bear it to be laughed at when you’ve come to trust that they think you’re interesting, and that Evangeline is beautiful, and maybe it’s ok for her to be exactly what she is while you keep the mask of normalcy like Hannibal does for Donatien. You wonder if Hannibal thinks about what the flat fur of the space between her eyes feels like, rather than the image of a bullet in it as fearful people do. You will kill him yourself if he’s like the rest, and you’ve allowed yourself to think otherwise. _ )

\---

The sun is exceedingly warm for a winter’s day in the office this Wednesday, the curtains thrown open to afford more spaces to rest animal bodies in the long cuts of light on the wood of the floors. “I dislike the fading in the stain that it makes, and most patients prefer the dark, but it’s a simple pleasure,” explains Hannibal, obliging as ever while Donatien sits on the desk lamp, craning his head to follow Evangeline’s path from door to ground, like she belongs there. 

“Far be it for me to deprive someone a little afternoon delight,” he adds smugly, pulling the sheers back and tying them off. Will closes his eyes, smiling against his better judgement while Evangeline gives a little heaving sigh.

“How many of those little jokes do you slide into your day?” he asks. “Not just the risque ones. I mean all of them.” 

“Less than you’d think,” Hannibal replies, standing with hands in his trouser pockets, watching with a studiousness that doesn’t suit someone watching an animal doze in a patch of winter sun. “More than are understood.” 

( _ Not many upper middle-class clients that can play ball when the ball is a series of memento mori that they’re not meant to understand, you think with a sneer that grows stronger towards yourself instead of Hannibal when you feel a little thrill at that. _ ) 

Will leans into his chair. “Happy to be an exception,” he says, and punctuating that, Donatien flies to balance on the flap of his pocket once more. 

Flattered, Hannibal had once said. There’s nothing they like so much as to be unusual, held apart in Will’s esteem. He nearly turns down to the bird to beat him to the punch -  _ in-order-to-know-virtue-etc _ . But Will just looks upwards, and feels his landing as a baseball to the chest, driven to sternum, thinking to drive further into lungs, heart, the rise of his chest.

It doesn’t bother him anymore. Will thinks he might actually be lonely without the daemon’s pressing attention, his black-eyed need to be close and share something that Will is beginning to understand but hasn’t learned to like the flavor of. Repetition is key. He drinks coffee until it doesn’t taste bitter. He drinks whiskey until it doesn’t burn. He says he’s the right person for justice and strength of character until it sounds like he’s serious, and Evangeline stops panting at the lie. 

What’s the difference between that, and chewing around fascia so that he can keep being himself with someone else?

( _ It’s better. _ ) 

“What do you really think of me?” Will asks, chin pressed to clavicle, bird feet pressed to buttonhole. “Not the evaluative kind of thinking, the kind you tell my boss and my human resources officer. I want to know what Hannibal Lecter thinks, handing out suppers with a pun for every piece of flesh that finds its way into a skillet.” 

( _ Better be sure that it’s better, Evangeline replies, excited against good sense, yowl in her throat. _ ) 

Hannibal considers that for a long stretch of time, face gone still and featureless as it was the first time Will saw him open the door, taking in the wreckage of  _ The Medusa _ , and the flotsam of Will and Evangeline strewn about the reception room. 

Evangeline doesn’t stir. From Will’s chest, Donatien simply turns his head, and digs a taloned foot as far into the fabric as he can, close enough to mean something this time of all times. Will shuts his eyes, and listens hard, whorl of an ear to the unseen divider between them. 

Across the room, Hannibal is still quiet, but breathing through his nose, long and loud and not quite distressed but livewire energized.

( _ They’d regret if you died, is the first thing you hear, especially when they’ve gone to such work to make you proud of the little lovely thing stretched out on the floor, the truest shape of adaptable, nervous, competent Will Graham. They’d regret the loss of your brilliance, your company, your unpolished but impressive capacity for violence tempered by good behavior and thirty years of learning to blend in when everyone tries to unearth you. _ )

The claw presses until it finds purchase under the top layer of skin. 

( _ They want to be close to someone, they want someone to talk to, they want you because you could see them the same way they can see you - daemons shaped to your truest self, mouth forced to cover your teeth so she can unsheath hers, so he can clack and tear with the beak of his. _ )

“I think there are few like you,” says Hannibal, “and that I have been very fortunate to have found you in my lifetime, in all your wanderings when the two of you are so careful to be quiet.” 

“People don’t like it when people like us are loud,” says Will, voice thick. “That’s why you’re so careful to not be heard, even if you do want to laugh, right? You’re loud in other ways that aren’t as obvious. We’re different in that way. Everyone sees what we are.”

“They don’t, not really,” says Hannibal, letting a hand out of his pocket to rest on his thigh, still turned to Will, but face hidden by the sun coming in behind him. “I don’t think I’ve fully seen you, and I’ve been keeping my ear to the ground to hear what I can through Donatien.” 

Will smiles again. “Having a hard time getting a clear signal when you don’t want to give up your upper hand?”

“We wouldn’t want to impose by pressing further without consideration of you.” 

This is said with such a hungry look, Will would mistake it for Evangeline were she not so satisfied on the ground, which means Will is, and that’s as much of a clear conscience he is going to get, he supposes. They are the same thing, and one sometimes knows before the other, but they always eventually know. They are united in this temporary calm, where Hannibal and Donatien are restless, used to pressing, wanting to touch. 

Hannibal so clearly wants to touch her. Will thinks maybe he did from the first day. 

“Go ahead,” says Will, waving a hand at the wrist. Donatien leans to follow it. 

( _ Which means you too. You too, you too, comes that bird call of a thought. _ )

They can do this. 

They’ve been so close to it the whole time. 

“May as well,” he adds, and lets out a shaky breath. Unexplored territory, this. Again comes the impression of doing things in the wrong order, that maybe they should be lovers, or at least clearly friends, but Hannibal never does anything the way it should be done unless it’s food, and even that is in question. “She’d like you to, I think.”

The other man nods, moving to face the daemon at his feet. Hannibal crouches, and Evangeline turns her head and her ears up, yellow eyed and at the edges of manic anytime. All the time. “Are you sure?” he asks, turned towards Evangeline, speaking to Will. 

“You’ve been dancing around the edges of asking me to do the same for months,” says Will irritably, leaning into the armchair with dread and fascination. Hannibal crouches, still looking towards the coyote, hands tight at the sides of his slacks. 

He reaches out - Evangeline’s black lips stay sealed, knife-teeth sheathed for the moment, but pulse between them wild. 

Hannibal catches the edge of her ear, hairs like the awns of wheat grain, bristly and scratching at the fine lines of fingerprints. Her yellow eyes go lazy and closed, and Will idly wonders if Hannibal will feel her as the sunlight, or as something different that burns and sits heavy in the pull of the earth. They both hold their breath. 

Hannibal does too. 

“ _ Still she stood, with her colorless lips apart, while a shudder ran through her frame, and, forgotten, the flowerets dropped from her fingers _ ,”says Hannibal, pressing from the long point of an ear, down to the crest of Evangeline’s brow. “ _ And from her eyes and cheeks the light and bloom of the morning. _ ”

Will shuts his eyes to the sunlight, and the engulfing press of the walls between his mind, and Evangeline’s, and Hannibal’s, and thinks of demolition. These walls could use a few windows, the architect would say, and the architect wears plaid, and enjoys a morbid gaff, and thinks the scavenger and hunter in Will and her are welcome, and that he’d like to press hands against them again and again.

“I thought once she’d smell of frost and wood char in the forest,” Hannibal says very secretively, into Evangeline’s ear, hands still deep in the bristling hairs of her neck, and her with her eyes turned to the back of their sockets, just barely opened to watch now. Will hears it in his neck, his tongue, his palatine bone where he presses lies into so that his truths can come out instead. He thinks his eyes are hiding like hers.

“What is she instead?” he asks red-faced and breathless. 

Hannibal moves his hands in broad strokes. “She smells like you. Ozone, sweat, road dust. The iron of meat and the coolness of a winter evening.” 

Will turns his head away from this to shake in the chair. He returns to the kitchen in his mind, not Hobbs’ but Hannibal’s, and ladles great bowls of soup for himself, and long strips of rabbit for Evangeline to consume without a single self-conscious thought. The memory of feathers tangling his hair is on his scalp. The taste of fresh ichor from ten shots of a gun is under his tongue, and the knowledge that he enjoyed that is under his skin where Hannibal can see it. 

_ In order to know virtue, we must first acquaint ourselves with vice _ , Will thinks to himself, and beneath his chin, moving the hair around the nape of his neck aside but still just shy of full contact, Donatien nods. 

“Only then can we know the true measure of a man,” comes the low reply of the bird. 

\---

Surveying the murder in front of them feels like it’s from very far away, even knowing that the missing liver from the victim is currently moving through his body, served with a chimichurri and fragrantly spiced onion and parsnip. 

Will can’t be entirely sure of it, but Will’s been assured he’s the only one that could see it if it was. He knows the taste of that now - what he’s not supposed to have, how he’s not supposed to be seen, what he shouldn’t allow others to take. 

It’s kind of liberating to not worry about that anymore. 

“Well it’s not like she had much use for it at this point,” says Evangeline when Jack Crawford mentions that it bothers him that it’s missing. Not enough pageantry to match the few recurring villains of the region by his consideration, but close enough to catch his nose. 

Will laughs when Crawford turns away, pushing his fingers into the ruff of her neck, before clearing his throat and continuing with his notes.

“A careless thing to lose,” says Hannibal with a featureless smile of his own, not the type to laugh with teeth, but the type to have them, as is Donatien. 

As is Will especially, as is Evangeline. 

  
  


**Author's Note:**

> I really wanted Hannibal to have a conure for a daemon like it was written in my soul.
> 
> Literature/people referenced:  
> Evangeline, a Tale of Acadie by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, an accounting of an early settler's attempts to find her lost husband by crossing the American frontier.
> 
> Donatien Alphonse Francois, the Marquis de Sade, popular for his sexual and violent philosophies, best known for the word "sadism".


End file.
